Adam Van Brimmer | (TNS) The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

SAVANNAH, Ga. — For years, the face of travel in this antebellum town tended to be sun-kissed pink and slightly sweaty, peering from the open-air window of a fully loaded tourist trolley.

Not anymore.

The luxury traveler is an increasing presence in Savannah, and the more discerning visitors are spurring rapid expansion of high-end hotels. The fourth such property to open in the last six years began operations last month, and two more luxury offerings, including a Ritz-Carlton, are in development.

Demand is high: the occupancy rate for Savannah’s luxury hotels topped 77% in 2023, higher than the upscale, mid-price, economy and even budget segments. The average rate was $265.71, and revenue per available room, a key industry metric, eclipsed $200.

Room rates at the city’s three premier properties — the J.W. Marriott Plant Riverside District, the Perry Lane Hotel and the Hotel Bardo, with a combined 700-plus rooms — often top $400 a night.

According to Michael Owens, a longtime hotelier who now heads an industry advocacy group, the Savannah Tourism Leadership Council, Savannah is “having a moment” with the luxury traveler — but one that’s built to last.

“The success reflects a concerted effort by the industry leaders in this town to seek the guest who buys by the bottle instead of by the glass,” Owens said. “We’ve arrived.”

Game-changing properties

Savannah has rapidly evolved as a visitor destination over the last three decades.

The Hotel Bardo is located in a 19th-century mansion in the historic district of Savannah, Georgia. The hotel, which just opened in February 2024, is the latest example of luxury accommodations in the city. (Left Lane/Hotel Bardo/TNS)

The city’s historic district often doubles as a movie set and a now 70-year-long historic preservation movement has brought notoriety. Add in a well-executed marketing strategy over the last two decades and the city’s tourism appeal has never been higher. According to an annual visitation study, Savannah attracted about 10 million overnight visitors last year, nearly double the volume from the pre-Great Recession years.

But until 15 years ago, luxury travelers made up a small percentage of those come-and-stay visitors. Prior to the Great Recession, those tourists had to choose between a well-appointed bed-and-breakfast or historic inn such as the Marshall House, or a suite at the Westin, Marriott, Hyatt Regency or Hilton.

Many decided instead to treat Savannah as a day trip during a visit to nearby Charleston or Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, two well-established luxury travel markets. Not until the 2009 opening of the Avia, a 150-room hotel on Ellis Square now known as the Andaz, did Savannah boast a large-scale, high-end property on par with what could be found up the coast.

“The Avia got more of those luxury travelers to stay the night here,” said Joe Marinelli, president of Visit Savannah, the local convention and visitors bureau. “Once it started happening, the others followed.”

The J.W. Marriott Plant Riverside District and the Perry Lane Hotel, another Marriott luxury property, were the “game-changers” for Savannah, Marinelli said.

Plant Riverside is a $400 million redevelopment of a century-old electricity-generating facility located along the Savannah River. The property opened in 2020 and is as much a natural history museum as a hotel, complete with a 135-foot-long, chrome-plated dinosaur skeleton that hangs from the lobby’s roof.

The Perry Lane, meanwhile, is tastefully elegant and has elevated expectations for service levels. Upon its 2018 opening, the hotel’s staff-to-guest ratio was the lowest in the city and included a butler on each floor. Conde Nast named the Perry Lane to its 2019 “Best New Hotels in the World” list, and TripAdvisor ranked it “Best Hotel in the U.S.” in 2023.

The courtyard of the Hotel Bardo includes an expansive seating area for guests to relax in. The hotel, which opened in February 2024, is the latest example of luxury accommodations in Savannah, Georgia. (Left Lane/Hotel Bardo/TNS)

The Perry Lane sold in 2021, but the original operators saw tremendous potential for luxury travel business in Savannah. The group, Left Lane, is behind the Hotel Bardo and is developing another high-end property in a historic building located on Johnson Square in downtown.

“We always believed in the depths of the luxury market here,” said Pritpal Singh, Left Lane’s chief operating officer and the firm’s frontman in Savannah. “At first, we went with anecdotal data, with gut feel, at the Perry Lane. Running that hotel for three years gave us hard data, and by the time we’d sold, we’d fallen in love with this city. We know we can do more here.”

Richard Kessler, a hotel business legend and the owner at Plant Riverside, feels likewise, albeit for different reasons. He grew up in the Savannah area and it was during his formative professional years with another local hotelier, Cecil Day of Days Inn fame, that he says he recognized the potential for luxury travel in Savannah.

He opened what is considered Savannah’s first large high-end hotel, the Mulberry Inn on Bay Street, in 1982. At the time, downtown Savannah’s renaissance was in its infancy — the transformation of River Street from rundown to respectable happened in the late 1970s — and the Mulberry remained an outlier.

Kessler left Days Inn in 1984 and started his own company, best known for the Grand Bohemian line of hotels. He didn’t invest heavily in Savannah again until 2005, when he opened The Mansion at Forsyth Park, the property recently redeveloped by Singh and Left Lane as the Hotel Bardo.

He added the 75-room Grand Bohemian Savannah Riverfront in 2009 – a hotel fondly known as a “rooftop nightclub with rooms beneath it — and started work on Plant Riverside a few years later.

“People with money can go anywhere, and there are a lot of places to go in this world for luxury,” Kessler said. “What we’re see in Savannah now is a destination that is stepping up to the line to offer quality in many areas.”

The lobby of the J.W. Marriott Plant Riverside District includes a chrome-plated dinosaur skeleton and other natural history artifacts. The $400 million project opened in 2020. (The Kessler Collection/TNS)

The luxury hotel boom and the steady demand for rooms have resulted in other properties in Savannah elevating their guest experiences, particularly those located downtown that carry the international name brands. The Marriott Savannah Riverfront, the Hyatt Regency and the DeSoto Hotel, long a Hilton property until going independent in 2017, have undergone extensive renovations in the last decade.

But the biggest difference, say industry leaders Marinelli and Owens, is in the quality of the workforce. The Perry Lane set a new standard for guest service, leading rival properties to embrace more extensive training programs. And because the hotel industry is transient by nature, many top-level employees at the luxury hotels have been lured away to other spots in town and have brought their expertise — and expectations — with them.

“Labor is the key ingredient,” Owens said. “So many of the leaders in this industry started at the very bottom, washing dishes or cleaning rooms. They’re used to competition, and that’s what success is all about.”

Boosted by Bardo?

The Hotel Bardo seeks to once again redefine Savannah luxury travel.

The property is unique. Built in the late 1800s across Drayton Street from Savannah’s famed Forsyth Park, the Romanesque Revival-style mansion was originally a personal residence for one of Savannah’s most successful Reconstruction-era businessman, Lewis Kayton.

Left Lane bought the property for $52.5 million in 2022 and spent more than a year renovating it into what Singh calls an “urban resort” and wellness retreat, with a spa, fitness center and expansive pool deck. The Bardo received a “Leading Hotels of the World” designation upon its opening, and speculation is it could become Savannah’s first five-star hotel.

According to Singh, the Bardo brings experiences found in other luxury markets but missing in Savannah, such as a club for local residents that allows access to the hotel’s wellness offerings. This environment enhances the visitor experience because it encourages mingling with Savannahians on the property.

“The one responsibility we have is to not allow gravity to set in — you can’t take your foot off the gas when you’re doing something new and innovative,” Singh said. “We have to propel ourselves and the rest of this market in the direction of providing better experiences for the luxury traveler.”

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©2024 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Visit at ajc.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Según el Servicio de Ciudadanía e Inmigración de Estados Unidos (USCIS por sus siglas en inglés), actualmente hay unos 544.690 beneficiarios activos de DACA en el país.

El programa de la Acción Diferida para los Llegados en la Infancia o DACA como comúnmente se le conoce va cumplir 12 años en unos meses. Muchos de los beneficiarios del programa han madurado junto al programa, y una reciente encuesta encontró que los beneficiarios de DACA han vivido en promedio 25 años en los Estados Unidos.

La edad promedio de los beneficiarios en el momento de su llegada al país era de sólo 6.6 años.

Por nueve años el Immigration Policy Center de la Universidad de California en San Diego, la organización United We Dream, el National Immigration Law Center, y el Center for American Progress han realizado una encuesta nacional para analizar las experiencias de los beneficiarios de DACA.

Según el Servicio de Ciudadanía e Inmigración de Estados Unidos (USCIS por sus siglas en inglés), actualmente hay unos 544.690 beneficiarios activos de DACA en el país.

El programa ha estado entrando y saliendo de tribunales y en episodios anteriores se ha abordado la decisión de restaurarlo en 2020; la reunión que tuvieron seis beneficiarios de DACA con el presidente luego de posicionarse en el cargo; el bloqueo para que nuevos solicitantes no pudieran aplicar en 2021; el retraso en las renovaciones y sus implicaciones para los beneficiarios de DACA; y más recientemente sobre los 10 años del programa y su futuro incierto.

Y así como el futuro del programa es incierto, los beneficiarios de DACA temen ser deportados o que algún familiar lo sea, dice la encuesta. 

El 36.6 por ciento de los encuestados dijo que piensan en este escenario al menos una vez al día, mientras que más de la mitad, 55.7 por ciento, dijo que piensan en que un miembro de su familia pueda ser detenido o deportado, al menos una vez al día.

La encuesta exploró además otros aspectos de las vidas de los beneficiarios como empleo, impacto en salarios, impacto en la economía y la educación. 

Gracias al permiso de trabajo que reciben los beneficiarios del programa, el salario promedio por hora de los en promedio pasó de $11.92 a $31.52 por hora, describe la encuesta.

Los resultados de la más reciente encuesta se publicaron el 25 de marzo, así que para hablar de los hallazgos invitamos a una de las autoras del reporte, Rosa Barrientos-Ferrer, quien es analista Analista senior de políticas para el Center for American Progress y quien ha sido beneficiaria de DACA.

Más detalles en nuestra conversación a continuación.

Ciudad Sin Límites, el proyecto en español de City Limits, y El Diario de Nueva York se han unido para crear el pódcast “El Diario Sin Límites” para hablar sobre latinos y política. Para no perderse ningún episodio de nuestro pódcast “El Diario Sin Límites” síguenos en Spotify, Soundcloud, Apple Pódcast y Stitcher. Todos los episodios están allí. ¡Suscríbete!

Christopher Lawrence | (TNS) Las Vegas Review-Journal

LAS VEGAS — It’s the world’s largest LED screen, offering nearly 580,000 square feet of artistic freedom.

Each of Sphere’s diodes can display 256 million colors, and there are 48 of those diodes in each of the approximately 1.2 million LED pucks that blanket its exterior.

Yet for all of its bells and whistles, every state-of-the-art this and never-been-done-before that, the most popular piece of content to have graced the Exosphere resembles something that could’ve been texted on a BlackBerry.

He/she/it/they or however the smiling, yellow Emoji identifies — Sphere executives aren’t saying — has become the giant public face of the $2.3 billion venue.

Emoji looks on as crews remove fencing from the Las Vegas Grand Prix course on Sands Avenue in Las Vegas on Nov. 20, 2023. (K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal/TNS)

When Sphere was named to The New York Times’ 71 Most Stylish “People” of 2023, sandwiched between Utah ski crash trial defendant Gwyneth Paltrow and “The Traitors” host Alan Cumming, it was Emoji in the photo.

Guy Barnett, who oversaw Sphere’s brand strategy and creative development before recently transitioning into a consulting role, declares it one of the venue’s “smash-hit successes.”

And he knows a little something about pop culture icons. During his previous career in advertising, Barnett was the driving force behind a new spokesman who helped NBC promote its acquisition of Premier League soccer. The character’s name? Ted Lasso.

‘This is going to freak people out’

Last Fourth of July, when the Exosphere was illuminated for the first time and the world gazed upon it in slack-jawed wonderment, Barnett noticed something was missing.

“I think what we found, once we were in that landscape and we turned it on, is that there can be a lot more playfulness, a lot more connectivity with an audience that’s on the ground,” Barnett says. “A lot more fun can be had.”

One of Sphere’s early breakout hits was the realistic eyeball that kept watch over the city.

One of Sphere’s early breakout hits was the realistic eyeball that kept watch over the city. (K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal/TNS)

“There was a moment,” Barnett says, “where we thought, ‘This is going to freak people out.’” (Side note: It did.) “But then you also see it as a Salvador Dali homage once it’s in the cityscape. You see these artistic things that you can start to play around with. You can start to imagine different things.”

From those two realizations came Emoji. (There’s an internal name for the character, but Barnett says it can’t be revealed until it’s been fully trademarked.)

In the beginning, Emoji mostly looked around, assessing its surroundings with a childlike curiosity while seemingly interacting with people on the ground, in hotel rooms and in airplanes. Sometimes it slept, with cartoonish “Z’s” floating about. Every so often, through a process Barnett refers to as “planned serendipity,” Emoji would look directly at the monorail traveling beneath it.

Everything changed, though, on Oct. 9, when Canadian golf content creator Joseph Demare, who goes by the nickname Joey Cold Cuts, posted a video from his round at Wynn Golf Club. Lined up in front of Sphere, Demare’s tee shot was perfectly timed so that it appeared Emoji watched it take flight before looking down in disgust. “You know you suck,” Demare wrote in the caption, “when even the @spherevegas is trolling you after your tee shot.” It wasn’t long before the video was everywhere, appearing on social media feeds and local newscasts.

“We started to think, ‘We now have a character that brings emotion and brings playfulness to the Sphere,’ ” Barnett says, “which we just started to enjoy more and more.”

For its first New Year’s Eve, Emoji wore novelty 2024 glasses and unfurled a party horn while confetti rained down on its face.

And forget driver Max Verstappen and his near-constant bashing of the city as though he were an old-school wrestling heel. Emoji, wearing a Formula One helmet, was the real star of the Las Vegas Grand Prix. With the course taking drivers around Sphere during turns five through nine, Barnett and his team timed how fast the cars would be going at those points so they could have Emoji appear to follow them with its eyes.

A collaborative process

The videos that play on the Exosphere are referred to internally as “clips,” Barnett says. “But I think that is underserving them. I think we need a better name for them than that.”

These days, almost all of the clips are made in-house by the 40- to 50-member team — including animators, camera operators, graphic designers and the big brains who figure out how to put the various pixels in the right places — at Sphere Studios in Burbank, California.

It’s a collaborative process that starts with workshopping initial ideas to make them better. For the holidays, for example, someone thought of putting an ugly sweater on the Exosphere. Someone else built on that and suggested putting Emoji in an ugly sweater. The final result had Emoji struggling to get that sweater over its big ol’ noggin, then delighting in catching snowflakes on its tongue.

A clip like that, which already has the base Emoji as a starting point, will involve a team of 15 to 20 people, Barnett says, and “we can be up and running within one to two weeks on stuff like that.”

Clips that must be built from the ground up can take the same-sized team between four and six weeks, regardless of their ambition. Ones that may look simple, like the baseball that celebrated the Oakland A’s (potential) move to Las Vegas or the NBA Summer League-affiliated basketball, are deceptively hard.

Images that may look simple, such as the NBA Summer League-related basketball, are deceptively hard, says Guy Barnett, Sphere’s senior vice president of brand strategy and creative development. (K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal/TNS)

“Those things are actually more complicated in a way, because they’re more static,” Barnett says. “You have nowhere to hide (a mistake) when you’re looking at a basketball, so everything has to be absolutely spot on.”

Giving back to the community

With the sheer volume of clips, you could be forgiven for missing or even not giving the proper amount of attention to some of the truly special ones, such as those commissioned as part of Sphere’s XO/Art program.

“This is the world’s biggest canvas, and so not to hand it over to some of the great visual artists of our time, I think, would be remiss of us,” Barnett says. “We make sure that we’re embracing as wide a community as possible with that program.”

Refik Anadol, whose site-specific works utilize machine learning, kicked off the program Sept. 1 with “Machine Hallucination: The Sphere.” The Turkish-born artist and his team created what he calls “AI Data Sculptures” using millions of raw images of space that were captured by the International Space Station and the Hubble Telescope, as well as more than 300 million publicly available photographs of nature. It even incorporated real-time wind and gust speed data.

Sphere rang in 2024 with Andy Gilmore’s kaleidoscopic “Dawn, Noon, Night.” On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, London-based artist David Oku debuted “Vivid Dreams: A Colourful Celebration of MLK’s Legacy.” Shanghai native Shan Jiang contributed “An Inked Flight,” complete with flying dragons and paper lanterns, for Lunar New Year.

Super Bowl week saw a trio of new commissioned works. L.A.-based artist Mister Cartoon’s “For the Love of Money” resembled some of the black-and-gray fine-line tattoos he’s inked on the likes of Eminem and Travis Barker. Eric Haze, the former street artist who designed the logos for Public Enemy and Beastie Boys, tagged Sphere at the end of his piece, “Atmosphere.” And Robert Provenzano, professionally known as CES, brought New York’s “wildstyle” graffiti to the Exosphere with his “Gameplan.”

Since then, Sphere has debuted “Mirror of the Mind,” a meditative, crystal-based installation by Krista Kim, who’s been called one of the most influential people in the Metaverse, as well as “Now Forever,” which resembles a Crayola-infused brain scan, from Italian multidisciplinary artist Michela Picchi.

As part of the Sphere XO Student Design Challenge, Clark County School District and UNLV students can submit artwork with the goal of seeing it on the Exosphere.

The Exosphere’s art is a passion project for James L. Dolan, the New York billionaire who controls the Knicks, Rangers, Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall, among other holdings, and oversees Sphere Entertainment Co. as its executive chairman and chief executive officer.

“He has a vision where we are giving back to the community, that we are sharing,” Barnett says. “We’re not just bombarding you with advertisements. We are creating spectacle and wonder and allowing people to enjoy it as opposed to being consistently sold to.”

That vision plays into what Barnett says is Sphere’s overall programming philosophy: “We want to entertain you. We want to make sure that you’re intrigued to keep following, to keep playing along with us.”

So far, those followers amount to 1.7 million fans on Instagram alone.

What’s next?

Moving forward, look for Sphere to continue to show off during big moments.

In addition to the commissioned pieces, Super Bowl week saw all 57 Super Bowl rings get their moment on the Exosphere. And, in a break from the way it’s normally programmed in advance, much like a TV network complete with advertising breaks, the Exosphere was updated live during the game with every score change. It celebrated Patrick Mahomes’ MVP award as soon as it was announced.

The first Super Bowl ring, awarded to the Green Bay Packers, is shown on the Exosphere. (Daniel Pearson/Las Vegas Review-Journal/TNS)

The future also will see more of Emoji, just not as often as you might expect.

“We’re being a little more judicious now about how we use our Emoji friend, so that we can really make those moments very special,” Barnett says.

“There are lots of things that we will be doing and we will continue to do with the Emoji. Because when you’ve got a hit, you want to continue working it. But we never want to outstay our welcome, either.”

©2024 Las Vegas Review-Journal. Visit reviewjournal.com.. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Like the rest of the Wild, Kirill Kaprizov got off to a slow start this season, which sounds a little odd considering he had 18 points in the first 19 games. But he had only six goals and sometimes looked a little lost, finishing that stretch a minus-9.

Kaprizov was coming back from a serious hamstring injury that sidelined him for most of the last month of the 2022-23 regular season, and limited him to one point in a six-game, first-round playoff loss to St. Louis.

Whatever was bothering him, Kaprizov didn’t want to talk about it. Asked before a game Dec. 7 in Vancouver if he felt limited in any way, Kaprizov — with help from teammate Mats Zuccarello — mostly avoided the question before finally saying, “No, I’m OK.”

Whatever the reason, Kaprizov has found his game since. Heading into Tuesday night’s 8:30 p.m. puck drop at Colorado, he has 35 goals and 71 points — and is a plus-24 — in 51 games since John Hynes became coach on Nov. 28.

With two goals in the Wild’s 4-0 victory at Chicago on Sunday, Kaprizov became the first player in franchise history with three 40-goal seasons and now has 41 with five regular-season games remaining. With his team all but eliminated from playoff contention — a Wild loss or Vegas win would seal it — it’s a bittersweet accomplishment.

Kaprizov, 26, twice played in the championship for Russia’s elite Kontinental Hockey League and hasn’t missed the postseason since his first two seasons in the KHL with his hometown Metallurg Novokuznetsk in 2014-15 and 2015-16.

“It’s always tough. It’s not fun (to) just finish season early after regular season,” he said this week. “It’s where we are now. (We’ll) take some learnings and keep going next season, and this year we still have a couple games.”

Kaprizov takes a seven-game points streak into Denver (5-7–12) and leads the Wild with 41 goals and 89 points. He had two goals and an assist against the Blackhawks on Sunday, his 10th three-point game of the season. If that doesn’t tell you what he means to the Wild, look at the first two weeks of January.

While Kaprizov was sidelined by a rib injury suffered Dec. 30 in Winnipeg, the Wild were 1-6-0 and outscored 25-11. Before he was hurt, the Wild had won 7 of 8 games and pulled within three points of a playoff spot. Without him, they fell to 13th in the Western Conference and six points out.

The Wild found their bearings but never fully recovered.

Kaprizov’s injury wasn’t the only one to bedevil the Wild this season. Captain Jared Spurgeon played only 16 games before having season-ending surgery on his hip and back, and big guns such as Mats Zuccarello, Jonas Brodin, Marcus Foligno, Matt Boldy and Filip Gustavsson all missed significant time.

“It’s a tough season because it was a lot of injuries,” Kaprizov said. “I don’t play a couple, Zuccy don’t play, (Foligno) don’t play, Spurgey, Gus. You know, everyone just a little bit here, a little bit here. A couple guys were a little bit longer in injury. If I score goals, I try not to think about this. (I) just try to show my best every game, and that’s it.”

Since Hynes became coach on Nov. 28, the Wild are 32-20-6 — and 31-14-6 with Kaprizov in the lineup. After scoring four goals in his past two games, Kaprizov ranks fifth in NHL goals over the past three years dating to April 8, 2023.

Not bad for a fifth-round pick in the 2015 entry draft. The four players ahead of him — Toronto’s Auston Matthews (177), Edmonton’s Leon Draisaitl (156), Boston David Pastrnak (149) and the Oilers’ Connor McDavid (142) — were all first-round picks, and three of them were top-three picks.

“To be in that company, he’s obviously elite in the league,” Hynes told reporters after Sunday’s game. “I still look at Kirill (and) think the upside for him in the next couple years is going to be really impressive, just as he continues to mature, gain confidence.

“His ceiling is pretty high, and I think over the next couple years, we’re going to see that.”

Baaaaad Company

Kirill Kaprizov scored two goals Sunday and became the first Wild player to score 40 goals in three seasons . Since April 8, 2021, the Wild winger has been one of the NHL’s top five goal-scorers:

Player                     Team           G       GP     Pts.
Auston Matthews    Toronto        177    237    309
Leon Draisaitl          Edmonton   156    252    363
David Pastrnak        Boston        152    251    313
Connor McDavid     Edmonton   149    252    443
Kirill Kaprizov          Wild            139    235    289

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